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We’re nearly a month into 2022, and a little over a week past “Quitter’s Day,” the infamous date when most people ditch their New Year’s resolutions, so it seems like the perfect time to roll out a request—nay, a challenge—for you in the 11 months ahead: Find something to eliminate from your life. Consider it an anti-resolution, an anti-goal, whatever. Just commit 15 minutes to taking an inventory of your day-to-day life and answer these two questions:
- What are the biggest things annoying me about my life right now?
- What do I wish I could do more of on any given day?
That first question will help you identify your pain points (and it feels really good just to get them all out on paper). What can we do to streamline just one of those things to give you a little more time for the things you wrote to answer question two? And by “streamline,” I mean, what are some steps in the process that we can eliminate outright?
It’s human nature to tack on work flows and processes and extra steps to solve problems, when often, that’s the opposite of what we need. (Just picture any time a new boss is hired, and his/her first move is to implement new processes, adding steps to improve things…and slowing things down in the meantime.) We get into routines to get through our day-to-day lives, without realizing that as we change—and our demands change—sometimes those routines no longer make sense. Maybe you don’t need to be in that meeting or have that extra set of eyes on a final review of a project.
Letting go of it (along with any feelings like you’re “less responsible” for doing less on that front) is referred to as “renewal by subtraction” in the November/December 2021 issue of Psychology Today, and a term coined by the forced changes we had to make to our lives amid the pandemic. “People discovered not only that change by subtraction was possible, but that deletion and simplification can make life more fulfilling. Subtraction leaves room for renewal,” writes author Carin Eriksson Lindvall, Ph.D. “The world is too complex to be navigated just with routines, but without them we become lost and inefficient. We need to return only to the ones that match current problems and make life more rewarding.”
Lead photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash
